


Death and What It Leaves Behind

by orphan_account



Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Character Death, Creativity Split (Sanders Sides), Death, Disasters, Disturbing Themes, Drabble, Food Poisoning, Gen, Graphic Description, I guess????, Implied/Referenced Suicide, King is very morally neutral, Plague, Resurrection, Suicide, based on two prompts from writer bot on discord, roman and remus play a minor role in this, theres a famine, wondering which twin saw the body? guess!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:07:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23777362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: The King of the Imagination dies, leaving two young boys in his place.But how--or, rather, why--did it come to this?
Kudos: 18





	Death and What It Leaves Behind

He’d known that death was an inevitability.

Well, perhaps that’s not true. He’d known it would come for his _host_ , but he could never be sure what that would mean for _him_. Could the fictional truly die? Could something that never existed to begin with reach an end? Such questions have no answers. And sure, he could agonize over this dilemma for as long as he desired, wasting away until all that remained was an empty kingdom, an abandoned castle, a skeleton in his bed—but what good would that do? He’s a king, after all. He has responsibilities to carry out—ones that only he can tend to.

But the questions still haunted him.

Death is inevitable. A fact of life.

_Isn’t it?_

It starts with a bad harvest. Many fall ill, a few die, but the problem is caught quickly enough that the death toll remains low.

It’s inevitable. Bad things happen sometimes, outside of one’s control.

_But why?_

Then the water supply is poisoned. Lungs gasp for air and lips turn blue, veins popping out of skin, but still, nothing can be done to save those that drank the tainted water. They pass, the sounds of bells haunting him in his nightmares.

The water is too dangerous to salvage. He finds a new source for their drink.

Nobody knows where the poison came from.

Inevitable. They didn’t know before, but they know now. Nothing could be done before.

_But how do you know?_

After the poison comes the plague. Teeth rot in people’s heads, their skin turns black, their hair falls out and their eyes turn a sickly red, the voices of the inflicted reduced to guttural groans and pleas for help. Some report that eyes spread like rashes along the sufferers’ skin, arms and legs and chest and back all covered in angry, pulsating eyes that glared at all who viewed them. Rumors had it that looking into those eyes allowed the plague to spread.

They say that when the eyes popped, so, too, did the inflicted’s heart.

But this, too, came and went, leaving behind it a storm; a storm that ruins their kingdom and leaves so many homeless that unrest and paranoia sweeps throughout the land faster than the winds and rains had. His people begin to talk, theorizing why these disasters continue to happen, wondering why they suffer, and others do not.

They all come to the same conclusion. Not that they could find any other explanation, what with this being the imagination of someone’s mind and one sole person being in charge of it.

And yes, he knows, deep down, they will blame him, much like how he blames himself. It would be deserved because, like the good that has been brought to the kingdom, he, too, controls the bad, even if only by accident. He knows that the inner turmoil in his heart, the constant battles in his mind, caused this to happen.

He knows, as he stares down at the sunken eyes and hollow cheeks of the two lifeless children in front of him, his core held in his fist, that his kingdom will come for him and destroy him.

He knows that death was inevitable, and today, he will die.

So, looking down at his core in his hands, the King digs his nails in and tears it in half, ignoring the immediate feeling of his heart being ripped from his chest and every nerve igniting in his body like live wire.

He lowers each half into the two cold bodies in front of him, gentle and careful, almost as though the action is out of love and not a desperate attempt to survive. He does so, watching as red and green light envelopes their bodies before eventually sinking into their skin, bringing color into their too-pale frames.

He watches them take their first breaths.

He watches them begin to stir.

And then, shaking, aching from head to toe, blood spilling from his eyes and mouth, King Creativity collapses.

Because he knows that, with his passing, peace can be brought to his kingdom.

(Yet in the back of his mind, he still wonders— _is death truly inevitable?_ )

(And can the two halves of himself handle his role separately from their host and, most importantly, from each other?)

A young boy opens his eyes to be greeted to the sight of a dead body. Wide eyes and hollow cheeks stare up at the ceiling, unseeing. There is recognition on his face as he stares at the cold, rotting corpse, taking in its sunken, maggot-covered features with an odd curiosity.

He looks at the body, then to the sleeping boy still resting on the floor, his hands folded behind him.

Then, lifting the other boy in his arms, he casts one final glance over his shoulder at the corpse before he turns and walks away.


End file.
